Tag Archives: users

Sometimes you need to create users in WordPress with PHP code, be it because you’re importing users, or because you want to let one user add other users. When you do this you want the new users to be able to reset their password.

At first I thougth to use a password reset link, to the password reset page in WordPress, but this is not very user friendly:

The user has to enter his username or email address

The user will receive a resetmail with a link.

After clicking it, the user can reset the password.

It would be much better if we could directly send the resetlink that leads to the third step. To do this we need to create a password reset key, which is only temporarily valid.

If you want to do a search in your WordPress users, or in Ultimate Member members, (which amounts to the same thing), you would think this can be easily done with a meta_query, or with the search query functionality that is built in into WordPress.

This is not the case! When creating some code doing this, I discovered that with a meta_query, a user searched by username doesn’t get found. Looking in the query that is created by WordPress, I noticed that WordPress only searches in the wp_user_meta table. The username is part of the wp_users table.

On the other hand, if you use the “search” query, WordPress only searches in the users table, so won’t find users by firstname or lastname.

To solve it, you have to combine the two. In the example below, the totalusers variable contains the list of users that matches the input $str on either username, user_nicename, user_email, firstname, or lastname. You can extend it at will of course.